Today’s glimpse from our gallery of past MCC fellows/finalists: renowned composer Shirish Korde (Music Composition Fellow ’07) blends Western classical with Indian musical traditions in an excerpt from Svara-Yantra.
What stands between you and What Stands Between Us and the Sun? Well, the literal answer would be whatever mileage and topography stands between your current location and the AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media in Jamaica Plain. But isn’t it also the modern era, that socially networked hyper-connectivity that distracts us all from attending the readings, art exhibitions, film screenings, dance concerts, orchestral work premieres, and other assorted artistic greatness that we know in our heart of hearts we want to attend? Not surprisingly, our official ArtSake suggestion is, after reading this post (and all other ArtSake posts you have yet to read), disconnect and go experience some art.
One of the options you’ll have available to you is the current AXIOM show, a photography, installation, and video project by artists Megan and Murray McMillan.The McMillans’ interdisciplinary work starts when the collaborators build a theatrical set, which serves as a stage for a video and photography production. With What Stands Between Us and the Sun, the McMillans built an artificial lake in warehouse in Rhode Island (where the McMillans are based). The AXIOM exhibition includes a video, photography, and elements from (or referring to) the original set interwoven into the piece.
Below are images from AXIOM’s Flickr page, including the exhibition’s installation and its opening reception. The show is on exhibit at the AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media until November 27, and Megan and Murray McMillan will take part in an artists’ talk on Tuesday, November 9, 7-9 PM.
Images: Megan and Murray McMillan, WHAT STANDS BETWEEN US AND THE SUN, photo, installation, and video project; images from AXIOM’s Flickr page (photos by Sarah Rushford): the show being installed at AXIOM; three images from the opening reception.
“Hey you two, you’re in the way! Can’t you see daddy is sketching. Now beat it.” -Quote from overzealous dog overheard on the banks of the Concord River. It’s true! I read it on the internets.
Photographers One Life International Photography Competition. The group Artists Wanted and the magazine PDN have partnered for One Life, an international open call for photography that delves into the lives of the global community.
Deadline: October 29, 2010
Networked Art Open Call for Networked Art to be commissioned for the exhibition Turbulence.org @ PaceDigitalGallery 2. Three commissions of $3,000 will be awarded. Works will premiere at Pace and on Turbulence in April 2011. Curators are seeking works that address the notion of “Levels/Hierarchies”, as in chains of command, levels of play, stages of life, degrees of comfort… Pace Digital Gallery is, itself, distributed across three floors of a building; within a broad stairwell to be precise. Practitioners are required to address the theme according to both the physical space and the distributed space of the Internet, where the works will permanently reside. Guidelines and proposal instructions.
Deadline: November 1, 2010
Call for Visual Artists Newton Free Library presents monthly exhibits by regional artists in the Gallery and Main Hall of the main library; a state-of-the-art facility which 13,000 people visit weekly. Learn more.
Deadline: November 12, 2010
Choreographers The BDA Rehearsal and Retreat Fellowship application is now available. It is a a three-day creative/rehearsal retreat for a choreographer and his/her dancers with additional funding to pay dancers during an extended rehearsal period. Two fellows will be selected for the third year of this project. The fellowships will take place between February and September 2011. The retreats will be held either at MASS MoCA in western Massachusetts or at a similar site. Selected artists will receive an honorarium up to $6,120 plus support for food and travel. Read more. Questions, email info@bostondancealliance.org.
Deadline: November 17, 2010
Playwrights: GAN-e-meed Theatre Project is inviting submissions of one-page plays on the theme of “Silence.” The top 15 entries will be displayed in the lobby of the theatre during the run of Silence by Moira Buffini (Dec. 2-18, 2010). Audience members will have the opportunity to view these entries and vote for their favorites based on visual, text, and content merit. The same 15 plays will also be presented as a free staged reading event on Sunday, December 12, 2010. Submission guidelines.
Deadline: November 20, 2010.
Image credit: Diaorama by Louise Stimson, located in the Wiggins Gallery at the Boston Public Library. Photograph by ArtSake.
This post is a pictorial tour of some of the exceptional stuff past fellows/finalists from MCC’s Artist Fellowships Program are currently up to.
1. Reimagined tea pots. Leslie Sills (Crafts Fellow ’95) created the above work, called HIGH TEA. The sculptural teapot is among the works included in The Teapot Redefined, an exhibition of sculptural teapots at Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge (through Oct. 31). The work was inspired by Leslie’s artist residency this past summer at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, which borders a sheep farm in Newcastle, Maine.
2. National film releases. Jeff Zimbalist’s (Film & Video Fellow ’05) documentary The Two Escobars is being released in San Francisco this month, is currently running in New York, and will have an LA release next week. The film recently received a glowing review by The Onion’s AV Club (and those discerning hipsters are tough to impress!).
3. Chinese World Expos. Martha Jane Bradford (Drawing Fellow ’85) collaborated with Chantal Harvey to produce Acquarella: The Fable, digital/virtual art on view in the Air Tree Exhibit in the Madrid Pavilion of the World Expo in Shanghai, curated by Spanish curator and virtual arts leader Cristina García-Lasuén. Martha (Alizarin Goldflake in Second Life) produced, directed, and designed most of the virtual environment, while Chantal Harvey helmed the 3-D computer animation. Watch the clip with narration in English or Chinese.
4. Literary/culinary benefit events. Former Poetry Slam National Champion Regie Gibson (Poetry Fellow ’10) will emcee the literary feast A Taste of Grub, a November 5 fundraiser for Grub Street, a writers’ service organization based in Boston.
5. Edens-in-progress. TRIIIBE (Sculpture/Installation Fellows ’09), the artists collective of Alicia, Kelly, and Sara Casilio and photographer Cary Wolinsky, is turning Boston University’s massive 808 Gallery space into a site-specific installation. In Search of Eden will evolve as creators and observers participate in developing a present day version of the Garden of Eden. If you’re in search of art that’s visually arresting, socially engaged, and possessed of a truly unique vision, then traveler, I think I know where to find your paradise.
6. Collaborative, two-part installations. Liz Nofziger (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’05) and Linda Price-Sneddon (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’01) have created a multi-media installation showing at two different art venues. Part one of That Which Changes That Which Stays the Same shows at the Villa Victoria in Boston through November 3, 2010. Part two shows at the Essex Art Center in Lawrence through December 8, with an Artists’ Talk Wednesday, November 17, 7-8 PM. The artists’ collaboration is itself the result of a collaboration (woah, meta) between Villa Victoria and Essex Art Center, called Exchange.
For more exceptional stuff, check out Fellows Notes.
Images: Leslie Sills, HIGH TEA (front and side view), ceramic; still from THE TWO ESCOBARS by Jeff and Michael Zimbalist; still from ACQUARELLA by Martha Jane Bradford and Chantal Harvey; Regie Gibson; promotional image for A Taste of Grub; TRIIIBE, FINE; installation view of THAT WHICH CHANGES THAT WHICH STAYS THE SAME by Liz Nofziger and Linda Price-Sneddon.
In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.
Here, Cynthia Morrison Phoel (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’10, ’04) discusses the personal and creative history behind her short story collection Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories.
Listen to an excerpt from Cynthia’s novella COLD SNAP.
Inspiration, in this case, took the form of evergreen mountains hovering over a valley of crumbling cinderblock apartment buildings. A ragged road that trudged up the mountain, passing old plaster houses and wrinkly babas in knit sweater vests. Caring (sometimes too much) neighbors who brought me food, invited me into their homes, and made my business their business. And 250 students, some of whom got a kick out of the young American teacher, others who did not.
The seeds of Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories were first planted during the mid-1990s, along with onions, garlic, tomatoes. Peace Corps years for me. Early post-Communist years for Bulgaria. These were wobbly, precarious times. The value of the Bulgarian currency had dropped precipitously, robbing people of their life savings. The country had recently emerged from a time of food shortages, and the residual distrust was palpable. If I harbored some doubt that this ramshackle bus I boarded would reach its destination without a flat tire or other mishap, this paled in comparison to the doubt Bulgarians likely felt in every aspect of their lives: that tomorrow might be a predictable continuum of today and that a stable future – let alone one that offered opportunity – was possible.
I did not go to Bulgaria with a writing agenda in mind (I did keep journals, but I have yet to harvest them). I was just there, living long, hard, wonderful days, without a computer, TV, radio, or reliable phone, but with plenty of time to watch the sheep that clustered on the main drag outside my apartment building, waiting for the shepherd to take them up the hill. Or the orange slant of the setting sun.
I did not entirely recognize the inspiration that had been sown in Bulgaria for some time. When I returned to the States, I had to find a job and start paying on student loans. My college boyfriend (now my husband), who had waited for me for two years, was ready to get married. I had to leave Bulgaria behind for a while and live in my new reality. But the seeds were there, like vague lumps beneath the soil.
Within a couple of years, I was dabbling in night courses and writing workshops, attempting to capture my Bulgarian experience in writing. I have a whole graveyard of stories about young American women living in small Bulgarian mountain villages. The stories are flat and comic and mocking. Nothing ever happens.
The big leap, for me, involved believing I could write from a Bulgarian point of view. This seemed too audacious to me: the entire time I was in Bulgaria, I knew my perspective was different, in part, because my time there was temporary. Bulgaria was not my destiny, and I didn’t dare own it as a Bulgarian might.
After a few years of floundering around, I eventually summoned some audacity. I was working on an MFA at Warren Wilson College at the time, churning out lots of material, and I found myself wondering how my friends and students back in Bulgaria were faring. What did the future have in store? When my students graduated from university, would they manage to find jobs? I wondered about the tolls that corruption and chronic unemployment would take on character. I thought about the aging population and about the load that women, in particular, carried in Bulgarian society. Women are the unsung, everyday heroes in Bulgaria – and in my book as well.
I was at Warren Wilson to learn, not necessarily to write publishable material. With learning as my intent, I finally dared to walk in Bulgarian shoes and to own characters that were fundamentally very different from myself.
The result was magical. With all that distance between me and my characters, I was finally writing fiction. I was deeply inside my characters, imagining how they would feel, what they would do, letting them take the lead. I stopped trying to poke fun, and instead started to simply see the humor that was inherent in my material. Most of all, I was respectful of my characters and generous, possibly to a fault. Being an outsider meant I had to give each character, no matter how unlikable, the fairest possible shot.
In short, I was beginning to write stories that worked.
Once I made this breakthrough, the stories started coming, slowly, slowly, but without too many missteps. The stories in Cold Snap were written largely in order. At some point, some of the characters began to reappear. At some point, I realized all these stories took place in the same town. At some point, I decided I wanted to spend more time with the characters I had left behind, and I could bring them back for an encore performance. Thus, the idea for the title novella was born.
People often ask me, how true are these stories? And the answer is very. Writing as an outsider meant that I couldn’t totally make things up. I had to represent my experience truthfully. I took people I had known on some level and got to know them a whole lot better, aging them, subtracting some characteristics and adding others, introducing them to situations I had seen others experience.
I doubt many people in my wonderful mountain town in Bulgaria recognize themselves. This is fiction, after all. But Bulgarians tell me they can see, feel, and smell what I’ve written. And Americans tell me that this very foreign terrain doesn’t feel so foreign at all.
Cynthia reads from Cold Snap during the Concord Festival of Authors on Sunday, October 24, reading at 3 PM. Then, on Tuesday, October 26, 7 PM, she reads at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. On Thursday, October 28, 7 PM, she reads at Andover Bookstore (for both the Porter Square Books and Andover Bookstore events, she’ll be joined by Tracy Winn). Finally, she takes part in the Blacksmith House Reading Series: Monday, November 1, 8 PM, at Blacksmith House in Cambridge.
Cynthia Morrison Phoel holds degrees from Cornell University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and Cerise Press. She lives near Boston with her husband and three children.
All images courtesy of Cynthia Morrison Phoel; delivering the Peace Corps swearing in speech (in Bulgarian); visiting friends – and baby goats – in the village; with students Preslava and Petya; roasting peppers on her balcony in Bulgaria; Peace!; Krastavitza the dog, who is included in many of the stories in COLD SNAP.
Choreographers Green Street Studios Emerging Artists Award Program: Winter 2011. This program is designed to provide infrastructure for choreographers, to create new work with a focus on group work and to provide deep, ongoing mentorship between experienced and early-to-mid-career choreographers. The Emerging Artist Award provides the opportunity for New England-based choreographers to be in residence at Green Street Studios from November 2010 to January 2011. Green Street Studios will provide choreographers with Mentor/Choreographers, and will provide 40 hours of rehearsal space per awardee for the creation of new work. The new works will premiere in a fully produced, shared concert at Green Street Studios. To receive an application, email info@greenstreetstudios.org or call 617-864-3191
Deadline: October 22, 2010
Site-Specific Installations Frame 301, Montserrat College of Art has a call for proposals seeking seeking site-specific installations to be exhibited monthly in its alternative, street side gallery window, located in the heart of downtown Beverly, Massachusetts. Proposals must include artist’s written concept, visual examples of how the artist intends to use the space, and a resume with complete contact information. Send proposals to Lydia.Gordon01@gmail.com. Learn more.
Deadline: October 31, 2010
Glass Artists The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY, offers one-month residencies for glass artists to utilize the Museum’s state-of-the-art glassmaking studio, research library, and encyclopedic collection of more than 45,000 objects. Room, board, transportation, and basic materials are provided. To apply, submit a detailed proposal as well as a description of necessary supplies, equipment, and assistants, and the best months between March and November to participate. Also enclose 10 digital images of your work on CD, two letters of recommendation, and a résumé. Learn more.
Deadline: October 31, 2010
Filmmakers Kopkind Short Films Festival – Call for Entries 8 filmmakers selected for the Vermont festival will be invited to the 2nd annual Pride of the Ocean Film Festival from Boston to Bermuda: May 27th to June 3d, 2011 for Film Slam Seminars. Accommodations (and some travel scholarships to Boston) will be awarded for the filmmakers selected. Contact John Scagliotti at stonewal@sover.net for more information.
Deadline: December 1, 2010
Work with DYS Youth The DYS Arts InFusion Coalition invites artists to the inaugural meeting of DYS Arts InFusion Coalition Arts Advisory Committee meeting on Friday, Nov., 19, 2010 from 11 AM- 2 PM at the DYS Training Center, 38 Institute Road, N. Grafton, MA. (Lunch will be provided.) This new group is forming to serve both as a think tank for the coalition’s Steering Committee and as a community of practitioners, providing networking, mutual support, and professional development. Arts Advisory Committee membership is open to all teaching artists and administrators of arts organizations working with or interested in working with DYS youth, either in residential treatment or in community settings. By creating unique partnerships with major juvenile justice, arts, and education leaders, the coalition will leverage significant resources to engage local artists, arts organizations, and social service agencies to develop the protocols, tools, and systems needed to effectively offer our community’s most disadvantaged members creative opportunities. Questions/RSVP to mark.smith@state.ma.us.
Photo credit: Photo of card catalogue by ArtSake.
The following is a guest post by Charles Coe, Program Officer for Cultural Investment Portfolio, Massachusetts Cultural Council -
Misha Gruenbaum at the Terezin Concentration Camp
As the audience sat in rapt attention, the speaker described how during World War II, the Nazis cynically promoted arts and culture at the Terezin concentration camp to maintain the fiction that the prisoners (who the regime claimed were in “protective custody”) were being treated well.
Among those at Terezin were children from an orphanage in Prague who sang frequently for fellow inmates. This all ended abruptly in October of 1944 when most of the children, along with the other prisoners, were sent to the death camps.
At one point during the lecture, the speaker showed a slide of children performing the final chorus of the opera Brundibar, which had been written for them while they were at the orphanage. Suddenly an elderly man got up, walked slowly to the screen, and pointed with a shaking finger to a child in the corner of the photograph. “That’s me,” he said softly, to a completely silent audience.
The lecturer was stunned. “I couldn’t speak,” she says. “Something poignant and very special was happening. I felt humble and grateful to share that moment with the audience.”
It was the evening of November 12, 2009, at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. The speaker was Ludmilla Leibman, founder and director of The Educational Bridge Project, a unique organization that uses collaboration in the arts to promote understanding between the United States and Russia. The project is sponsoring and promoting two performances of Brundibar this October.
Although this isn’t the opera’s first Boston-area performance, it represents a unique collaboration between children from the Lincoln Elementary School in Brookline and the musical theater Zazerkalie from St. Petersburg, Russia.
Brundibar will be presented at the Lincoln School. Music teacher Molly Quinlan has rehearsed the American children, and Sofia Drabkina, who directed a production of the opera in St. Petersburg, has been working with their Russian counterparts.
Michael (Misha) Greunbaum had not come from the orphanage in Prague, but at Terezin he joined those children in the chorus and played soccer – the only activities that helped him “forget the crowded conditions, the hunger, the diseases, the separation from our parents and constant fear of being sent ‘to the East,’ from where no one returned.” Ninety percent of the children at Terezin were eventually sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz; only a handful of the children in the photo survived the war.
When the children perform Brundibar in Brookline, Misha Gruenbaum will be there, although he plans to stay in the background, and Ludmilla will honor his wish not to speak to the audience. As the lights go down and children’s voices fill the auditorium, he will be sitting quietly, carried back to a time too terrible to remember that must never be forgotten….
Brundibar Performances:
Wednesday, October 27 and Thursday, October 28
7pm
Free Admission
Lincoln Elementary School Auditorium
19 Kennard Road, BrooklineLearn more about the Educational Bridge Project’s 18th-annual festival and Brundibar.
You can watch a documentary film about the Terezin camp and its artists – Prisoner of Paradise by Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender – on Hulu.
The Massachusetts Artists Coalition has organized two free events for artists of all disciplines:
Live-Art-Speak at the Boston Public Library, Saturday, November, 6, 2010 (1-4:30pm) includes a tour of the Kirstein Business Library geared for artists as well as information sessions on Cultural Districts, Fair Trade, Artists Spaces, and networking opportunities. Contact malc@artistsunderthedome.org.
The 4th Annual Artists Under the Dome Event at the Massachusetts State House, Nurses Hall, Thursday, November 18, 2010 (10:00am-3:30pm) is an opportunity for artists to meet with their elected officials and to hear legislators discuss issues around the arts in Massachusetts. There will also be networking opportunities, information sharing for artists in communities and for teaching artists. You are strongly encouraged to RSVP for this event.
Women Playwrights - Northampton Academy of Music Theatre will present a special evening dedicated to women playwrights on Thursday, October 21, 2010 (7pm). The evening will begin with short presentations by Martha Richards, the Executive Director of WomenArts and one of the “founding mothers” of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts; Magdalena Gomez, an award-winning Latina playwright; and Dr. Terry Jenoure, a performer, educator, writer and the director of the Augusta Savage Gallery at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their presentations will be followed by a staged reading of Mixed Relief, a one-act play especially commissioned by WomenArts to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Theater Project. This event is supported in part by the Northampton Arts Council and The Women’s Times, Inc. Admission is free with a $5 suggested donation. No reservations are needed.
Media Artists - Making Media Now 2010 Conference on Saturday, November 6, 2010 at Boston University School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Ave, Boston. This all day conference provides information on Social Media, Typography & Film, Managing your Production in a Digital World, and Distribution Models.
Artists – TransCultural Exchange’s Conference on International Opportunities in the Arts: Are you looking to tap into the International Art Market? Would you like to find ways to show overseas? Are you a writer interested in finding out what it takes to publish your first book? Are you a musician or composer who is looking for an amazing residency overseas? Have you always wanted to live overseas for a year and do research for a creative project but just didn’t know how to fund your trip? Meet key international curators, critics, editors, published writers and program directors at this conference. Boston Omni Parker House Hotel, April 7-10, 2011. Scholarships applications are due November 15, 2010.
Nine Boston-area artists are in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s 2010 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition.
We’ve been sharing Studio Views with the finalists for the prestigious $25,000 Foster Prize, and I’ve found it interesting the way artists’ descriptions of their art-making often seem to parallel the work itself. Fred H.C. Liang writes with evocative complexity about his complex, evocative work, and Evelyn Rydz unifies disparate elements in her description the way disparate, recontextualized images are brought together in her drawings. Meanwhile, Stephen Tourlentes‘s attention to process in his description and in his work allows the thematic overtones of his photos to resonate ever more clearly.
And here, Matthew Rich (Painting Fellow ’10) shares his studio and work in many, many fewer words than I’ve just used, much in the way his cut-paper compositions employ a subtlety and minimalism to distinctive, arresting effect.
1. My studio (looking towards the Northeast).
2. My materials (values)
3. More materials (complements)
4. My palette (large[new] to small[old] colors).
5. My workspace (the table, the floor).
6. My drums (in the corner).
7. A finished work (TWIST, 2009)
8. Another finished work (COMBINATION, 2009)
Work by Matthew Rich, along with that of the other eight 2010 Foster Prize finalists, will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston through January 17, 2011.
Images: all images courtesy of Matthew Rich; six studio images; TWIST (2009) Latex on cut paper, linen tape 36×58 in; COMBINATION (2009) Latex on cut paper, linen tape, 38×60 in.
Today’s glimpse from our gallery of past MCC fellows/finalists: a brief excerpt from Irene Lusztig‘s personal documentary Reconstruction, which explores Irene’s maternal grandmother and her role in a failed bank robbery in late-1950s Romania.
Since winning her MCC grant, Irene has gone on to teach at UC Santa Cruz, but she’s currently back in the area on a 2010/2011 Radcliffe Institute Fellowship.
Find a longer, higher quality clip from Reconstruction on Vimeo.
ArtSake is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
![[del.icio.us]](http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.ico)
![[Digg]](http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.ico)
![[Facebook]](http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.ico)
![[Google]](http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.ico)
![[MySpace]](http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/myspace.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.ico)
![[Yahoo!]](http://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/blog/artsake/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.ico)
